News

Web Summit concluded today with Peter Thiel of Paypal and Facebook followed by U2’s Bono. Highlights from last day include Google Programmatic Marketing efforts, Peter Thiel and U2's Bono, Bitcoin speeches and the winners for the ALPHA and BETA competition.

Google has published “The Secrets to App Success on Google Play”, a playbook meant to educate Android developers on creating applications that have greater chances to be appreciated by users, downloaded by more people and obtain better results.

Google made a number of cloud-related announcements during their Google Cloud Platform Live Event that is taking place in San Francisco these days. The most important is the availability of Google Container Engine (GKE), currently in public alpha. Others are: Managed VMs, more connectivity options, Cloud Debugger, Autoscaler, and price reductions.

Google have announced that they will remove support for the obsolete SSL 3.0 after discovering vulnerabilities that may be exploitable by forcing clients or servers to downgrade. Removing SSL 3.0 may also unlock stalled negotiations with HTTP2. Read on for more details.

Dart Engineer Søren Gjesse, has this week announced to the community new packages for accessing Google APIs. Gjesse says the API generator has been built to create Dart client libraries enabling access to Google services, including YouTube, Analytics, Google+, and Drive from Dart. However, not everyone in the Dart community is on board with the one package approach.

Microsoft recently announced Azure ML, a machine learning cloud based platform that helps predict future events based on past performance. Microsoft has been using machine learning for years for Bing, Xbox and other products but this is the first time that internal technologies are consumerized and deployed as cloud services. Ersatz Labs is also trying to build a PaaS for Machine Learning.

In an upcoming Chrome release, Google upgraded DevTools with a new “Device Mode” to enable streamlined device display emulation, media query inspection, and a new network throttling tool. These tools make it easier for developers to emulate various devices and situations that their web page will encounter in the wild.

Google has unveiled their new data-warehouse called Mesa. Mesa is a system that scales across multiple data centers and processes petabytes of data, while being able to respond to queries in sub-second time and maintain ACID properties.

Google is working with Linaro to develop a special edition of Android to support specific features required for the Project Ara customizable smartphone, said Linaro CEO George Grey. This collaboration is aimed to make improvements and additional functionality in the Android ARA version “part of mainline Android,” Grey said.

Google has recently made available the source code of the 2014 version of the Google I/O app. The primary goal of this is to provide a practical example of best practices for Android app design and development, including essential features to most Android apps, and a customizable template for apps with similar features.

Google announced the next version of the Android operating system at Google I/O 2014. Code named “L release,” in the most significant change to the system architecture a new runtime simply called the Android RunTime (ART) with an AOT compiler replaces the Dalvik virtual machine and its JIT compiler.

Google engineers have recently published a research paper presenting an empirical study of 26.6 million builds produced during a period of nine months by thousands of developers at Google. The paper describes the build workflow, and analyzes failure frequency, compiler error types, and resolution efforts. Such a study, its authors say, can help improve the build process and support to developers.